The Sum of Our Discontent (Cloth): Why Numbers Make Us Irrational - Hardcover

Boyle, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1587990601 ISBN 13: 9781587990601

Publisher: Cengage Learning, 2001

Synopsis

In The Sum of Our Discontent, David Boyle has put his finger on the problem with our numbers-obsessed societies: The trouble is that numbers have proliferated and that it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between a good statistic and a bad one and that therefore numbers have become meaningless and in the process reduced humans to be coldly calculating.

About this title

About the Author

David Boyle writes about economics for many papers and magazines, including The Guardian and New Statesman. He is the editor of New Economics magazine and the author of Funny Money published by HarperCollins.

Reviews

The flood of numbers in the modern world often obscures more than enlightens, hence the demystifying classic How to Lie with Statistics and its progeny. But according to Boyle the problem is irremediable and fundamental. "[P]oliticians can't measure poverty, so they measure the number of people on welfare. Or they can't measure intelligence, so they measure exam results, or IQ. Doctors measure blood cells rather than health, and people all over the world measure money rather than love." Boyle revels in such broad indictments, damning entire professions for popular or politicized misperceptions, whose complex origins he reduces to numbers themselves and the influence of a few seminal figures Jeremy Bentham, Robert Malthus and Frederick Taylor primarily whose personal quirks loom far larger than the historical forces that shaped their thinking and made the world receptive to it. Boyle is more persuasive discussing Keynes and how his heuristic approach to macroeconomics became rigidified, undermining his original intentions, but even here he entirely ignores the political forces involved. Adding confusion, he occasionally approves some uses of numbers, calling for bringing "common sense to bear on the dead world of figures, so we can see patterns again," as if this wasn't the point of using numbers all along, from Pythagoras to Kepler to chaos theory. Chapters dealing with ethical investing, alternatives to conventional economic indicators and Edgar Cahn's "time dollars" further muddle matters. (June)Forecast: With a $50,000 promotional budget, the publisher plans national radio and TV campaign, national advertising, and a tie-in with author speaking engagements. But this title won't pose much competition for How to Lie with Statistics, still in print after all these years.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Most writers who lament the ubiquity of statistics focus on the ways proponents of a particular cause misuse or distort data to make their case. Boyle, though, takes a step back to ponder why we are obsessed with numbers in the first place and to examine our seeming need to quantify everything. Boyle is the author of Funny Money (1999), a look at the growing number of ways of conducting financial transactions. His new book is an "Americanized" version of The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can't Make Us Happy, published last year in Britain. Boyle alternates his chapters between ruminating over our attempts to measure abstractions like happiness and satisfaction and profiling misguided efforts at numerical precision throughout history. Jeremy Bentham, Robert Malthus, Frederick Taylor, John Maynard Keynes, and Edgar Cahn all come under Boyle's scrutiny. At the same time, we are left to consider Boyle's fascinating observation that the very act of measuring something changes its nature and often turns it into something else. David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Boyle, a writer and journalist specializing in economics, feels that much of our difficulty in understanding economic and sociological problems can be traced to our attempts to describe complex systems by simple statistics. He points out that since most things in real life are multifaceted, one must almost automatically fail when trying to reduce such things to a single number. He also makes the very good points that what we choose to count tells us more than the result of the count, that many of our measurements are inaccurate, and, most importantly, that the measuring process affects the very things that we are trying to understand. However, whether our failures result from statistical oversimplification that may be correctable or from the inherent impossibility of the task is debatable. Boyle's book features short biographies, interesting in their own right, of people like Robert Malthus and John Maynard Keynes who have helped move us in the direction of greater quantification. For academic and larger public libraries. Harold D. Shane, Baruch Coll., CUNY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cengage Learning
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1587990601
• ISBN 13: 9781587990601
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200